Anthropic is racing OpenAI to the stock market and it is arriving profitable

Two of the three largest AI laboratories are heading for the public markets within weeks of each other. The smaller one is arriving with better numbers.

The Process

Anthropic's underwriters have begun scheduling meetings between company executives and prospective institutional investors — the step that typically precedes a formal roadshow by several weeks. The target is a Nasdaq listing this autumn, with October cited as the leading date across multiple reports.

The company filed a confidential S-1 registration statement with the SEC in June. It was valued at $965 billion following its Series H round in May.

The Numbers Being Pitched

The central figure in those investor meetings is a $47 billion annualised revenue run rate.

Alongside it: reported expectations of 130 per cent revenue growth, and — the number that separates this from every other AI listing — Anthropic's first operating profit.

That last item is doing an enormous amount of work. The prevailing assumption about frontier AI has been that the economics do not close: that training and serving models at scale consumes more than the products earn, and that profitability sits somewhere beyond the horizon of current spending. A frontier laboratory reaching operating profit while growing at triple digits would be the first real evidence against that assumption.

The Comparison That Frames It

OpenAI is running the same process on a similar timeline, and the contrast is stark.

OpenAI filed its confidential S-1 in May, targeting a September listing at a valuation between $852 billion and $1 trillion, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading. Its full prospectus is expected to become public this month. The figures that have emerged: roughly $25 billion in annualised revenue, more than 230 million weekly ChatGPT users, and a reported negative 122 per cent non-GAAP operating margin — a loss of about $1.22 for every dollar earned.

So the smaller company by user base is claiming roughly twice the revenue and a path to profit, while the larger one arrives with heavier losses and considerably heavier obligations. OpenAI has committed to approximately $750 billion in compute spending through 2030, and its chief financial officer has privately raised concerns about honouring those contracts if revenue growth lags.

Anthropic's Own Complication

None of which makes Anthropic's position simple, and the prospectus will have to address it.

The company has assembled roughly $71 billion in chip-lease debt in about 60 days, structured through special purpose vehicles that buy the hardware and lease it back, with Broadcom backstopping the senior tranches — which keeps both the assets and the obligations off Anthropic's own balance sheet. It pays xAI approximately $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 for exclusive use of the Colossus 1 data centre. It signed a $9.1 billion compute agreement with Bitcoin miner Riot Platforms.

Operating profit calculated with lease payments as an operating expense looks different from operating profit calculated with the underlying hardware on the books. That is legitimate accounting, widely used, and disclosed — but the S-1 will have to set out the full contractual picture, and investors will read the profitability claim against it.

What Is Actually At Stake

These two listings will establish the market's price for frontier AI, and they are arriving into scepticism. More than $1.3 trillion was erased from semiconductor market values in late July over doubts about AI infrastructure returns. AI-related securities class actions, though only 13 per cent of filings this year, account for nearly three-quarters of all alleged investor losses.

Anthropic has spent two years positioning itself as the more careful laboratory — slower, more safety-focused, more willing to accept constraint. It is now testing whether that positioning is worth anything to public-market investors, and it is doing so with the one argument they respond to most reliably: that it makes money.